Erwin McManus's Casket

by Phil Johnson



"For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions" (2 Timothy 4:3).

ack in August of '08, I wrote a post about the pretentiousness of Christians who try too hard to be artsy and manage to sully both art and the gospel in the process. (In retrospect, the tone of that post might sound a tad too cantankerous, even for me. But I completely stand by the point of it.)

One of the targets of my criticism in that post was Erwin Raphael McManus, self-styled "futurist, author, speaker, activist, filmmaker and innovator who specializes in the field of developing and unleashing personal and organizational creativity, uniqueness, innovation and diversity." Some say he is a "pastor" (though he seems to eschew that title and most other ecclesiastical terms). He's the lead speaker at Mosaic, "a Community of faith, love, and hope" in Pasadena. It's a Southern Baptist congregation, but you'd be hard-pressed to discover that from the church's own publicity. I spent many hours a few years ago watching videos and listening to sound files of McManus's teaching, and I have read two or three of his books, plus practically everything he has posted on line. I have never seen him explain, much less affirm, the gospel.

In that 2008 post I said: "Clear gospel truth is almost impossible to find in the material he publishes and posts for public consumption. And in that regard, I don't see a whole lot of difference between Erwin McManus and Joel Osteen. He's Osteen with blue jeans and an occasional soul patch rather than a shiny suit and a perpetual grin."

That unleashed a nearly 200-comment discussion in our combox. Most commenters who were already familiar with McManus voiced agreement with my assessment, but a few drive-by commenters criticized me for criticizing McManus. Then I had a lengthy discussion via e-mail with a key person on McManus's staff. No one could document a single source where McManus actually did preach the gospel.

A month later, Justin Taylor picked up the thread and asked for comments at his blog. I joined that conversation late, but here's the salient portion of the comment I posted at JT's blog:

I wasn't raising this question with regard to a single sermon or video. I'm pointing out that I can't find anywhere where McManus has dealt with sin qua sin—an offense against God as opposed to a personal hurt or emotional/psychological dysfunction. And I have never seen him even hint at the idea of repentance. I wouldn't be automatically critical of a preacher for a single gospel message that didn't include every aspect of systematic theology. In other words, I agree with your point: while it's true that the resurrection is essential to the gospel itself, that doesn't invalidate every tract or sermon or witnessing encounter where the resurrection isn't expressly mentioned. (I defended that very point a couple of years ago in the infamous controversy about Francis Chan's evangelistic video.) But if someone who preaches all the time never mentioned the resurrection—indeed, seemed to be deliberately avoiding it—I'd think it completely fair to raise the question of whether he really believed it. I have exchanged several e-mails about this with a senior staff member at Mosaic, and I received one message from Erwin McManus himself. Neither of them supplied references to any message or online resource where McManus has ever mentioned the necessity of repentance. I had a hard time getting the senior staff member to understand that I wasn't challenging McManus over an issue of technical theological terminology. His main reply to me was that just because McManus doesn't use words like repentance, justification, and penal substitution, it's unfair to assume he doesn't teach those doctrines. But after exchanging several e-mails with him, he still couldn't (or wouldn't) point me to any online resources where McManus has dealt with the ideas of repentance, justification, or propitiation using different terminology. So if we count that, plus all the replies to my initial post about McManus, plus all the comments in this thread, it brings the grand total of documented examples where McManus deals with the issues of sin, repentance, and justification to exactly zero. I'm not trying merely to be harsh here. But I honestly don't see why anyone would think McManus's approach to avoiding the gospel is any better than Joel Osteen's approach to avoiding it. I understand that they appeal to different demographics, so there are real stylistic differences between the two of them. But my concern is with the missing substance. I'd like to know why some who feel perfectly free to label Osteen a heretic think it's unnecessarily "vitriolic" to put McManus in the same category. A few of you have suggested that it's uncharitable even to raise this question. No one yet has offered a reasonable explanation why.

McManus's current project is further removed from the proclamation of the gospel than anything you'll ever see from Osteen—and that's saying something. McManus is shilling for an entry in Doritos® "Crash the Superbowl" contest.

It's an utterly tasteless commercial called "Casket." ("A guy stages his own funeral just to munch Doritos and watch football undisturbed—in a casket.") McManus himself produced the commercial for the Doritos® contest and Mosaic is "sponsoring" it. They won a spot among the six finalists (out of 4,000 entries)—and tickets to the Super Bowl. The top prizewinner will be chosen by popular vote. So McManus has removed every vestige of his own website and replaced it with an appeal for votes. He's Twittering pleas for votes on a fairly regular basis, too.

He is convinced this is the work of God: "It's a miracle and a divine comedy that we've made it this far," he told USA Today. "I think it's God's sense of humor."

Rick Warren is ecstatic about the prestige and potential $$$ a win would bring McManus. He Tweeted: "My guy Erwin McManus (Mosiac Church) created a Doritos Superbowl Ad! Church could win $! VOTE 4 him!"

Our friend Paul Edwards's Twitter feed, as usual, was more on target: "Majority of Christians will laugh rather than weep at @erwinmcmanus 's commercial because the gospel is no longer central in our thinking."

Mid-Morning Addendum: Someone privately asked my opinion about why Erwin McManus would devote the full resources of his church and energies to promote an entry in an advertising contest. Might he have motives that are good and pure? Could it be that he sees this as a kind of pre-evangelism that gets people's attention so that they will listen to his message? Are you perhaps being too hard on him for doing what most pastors do (but having more success at it)? The "pre-evangelism" ploy might have some appearance of merit if McManus's message ever actually got around to the evangel. But since that's not the case, it's an unwarranted stretch to imagine that he intends this as a kind of preliminary to something he clearly has no intention whatsoever to engage in. And let me be clear about something: I don't have actual statistics, but sadly, I think it might actually be true to say that Erwin McManus is just "doing what most pastors do." The mentality behind McManus's bravado and high jinks is by no means unique to him. It's the very philosophy behind the "market-driven Church" assumption: Any kind of publicity stunt is just as good as—and probably better than—gospel preaching for reaching the unchurched. That is the unspoken assumption behind most of the currently-popular evangelical carcinogens, such as the infamous "Church Marketing Sucks" blog, which I have critiqued in the past for precisely the same thing. Publicity is not the same thing as evangelism. Fad-chasing isn't "missional." You're not "reaching" people in any meaningful sense at all if the gospel is not the center and the main substance of your message to the world. That, you might say, is the salient point of every argument we have ever made on this blog.

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